I broke my website and here’s how I am going to fix it

Aargh! I broke my website and now I have to fix it!

If you’ve followed me for a long time, you know that I used to blog as Magnolia2Mumbai. Well, it seems that when I moved to my jeanspraker.com domain, that I did not quite follow website domain transfer best practices, and I broke my website.

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#StandWithSalman in a Sea of Stories

As part of their event, Pen America encouraged those who could not be in New York today to submit our own readings.

This reading from Haroun and the Sea of Stories is from chapter 10, Haroun’s Wish. The speaker who opens the excerpt is Khattam-Shud, whose name means “completely finished or over and done with” according to the book’s glossary.

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Audiobook review: The Past As Present by Romila Thapar

At first glance, a book on Indian historiography might not seem easily accessible to a general audience.
Yet, Thapar’s prose is lucid, and her tone remains conversational without losing its scholarly authority. Thapar connects arguments about the past to our present quite beautifully.

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My journey with Joyce

There’s a story about my maternal grandmother, Mom-Mom, and it goes something like this. My grandmother was always an avid reader. Despite dropping out of

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The Hadley brings vintage vibe to Park Towne Place

The first thing you notice about The Hadley restaurant is its vintage vibe. From the wood paneling that floats up the wall to meet tiered chandeliers to the heavy, cristal d’arques drink tumblers, every detail communicates mid-century design.

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Review: Upstarts

Tell me if you’ve seen this movie before….
There are these 3 college friends. When the movie opens, your first thought is, “Arre, yaar, these guys are idiots.” Then you see the girl. Because there is always a girl, isn’t there? Naturally, things don’t go well, the lovers are thwarted, and the friends end up standing at a train station that’s supposed to be in UP, but strongly resembles a Mumbai local station. All before the opening credits. That’s when you realize that you’ve guessed the wrong movie name. This movie is Netflix India’s latest release Upstarts.

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6 things I learned in 6 days at the Netter Center for Community Partnerships at Penn

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my two years in Philly, it’s the Power of Penn. Inclusion. Innovation. Impact. These three words underline Penn’s commitment to the community through collaboration and creativity. For 25 years, The Netter Center for Community Partnerships has lived this mission by “building a movement for democracy and social change.” That movement includes the Center’s Nonprofit Institute under the direction of Associate Director Isabel Sampson-Mapp.

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Overdoing it: Moving

I was born in Philly. For the first five years of my life, I lived just off Rising Sun Avenue. That changed when my parents

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Overcogitation and the wrinkle of appropriation

I was in a literary fiction hellscape populated with unfocused ideas and disconnected connections. Saying too much and nothing at all. How the hell did I get here? Overcogitation, of course, dear reader. And appropriation. Wait. What? I hear you, dear reader. You thought this post was going to meander down the well-worn navel-gazing tunnels of writerly insecurity and doubt. Oh no. I’m sorry, dear reader. You’ve come to the wrong blog for that. This post is about culture and its appropriation.

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 Shreya’s dream

The journey from Sikkim in the far north to Karnataka in the south isn’t just long; it’s arduous, entailing multiple long-haul trains. Such a journey would be difficult for a girl so young. I knew that. What I didn’t know is how to ask what I could not ask without asking.

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Book review: My Gita by Devdutt Pattanaik

For all the focus in the Gita on action rather than outcome, a book review, let alone a verdict, seems almost superfluous. As a novice reader of the Gita, I would recommend this book. I am glad this was my last read of 2016.

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Review: Rain by Sriram Subramanian

It’s in his philosophical approach that Subramanian shines. For while on the surface the book is a story of a guy trying to prove an astrologer wrong, at its core, Rain is a complex study of the struggle we all face when we try to understand belief within the framework of a highly scientific culture.

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